I'm still working on getting all of the old images back up, but that's a rather low priority thing compared to some of my other projects.

If you want to see me review video games in a much more professional manner, please check out my review blog. (Which, funnily enough, I haven't updated in a while. I was doing so well, too...)

https://kirbysreviewblog.wordpress.com/

I've got some ideas for a comic of my own. But I'm still hashing them out. If/when it does happen, that's when I change authorship from my Zero Kirby account to another one. It's not a perfect solution but y'know. You do what you can. We all have to suffer the consequences of our actions, myself included.

Like most other webcomics out there it's mostly harmless. The only crime it has is just not being very funny or interesting. This is due to a lot of factors, though.

The first one is that Bob and George exists and managed to get the Grandfather Clause on a lot of common sprite comic conventions by virtue of being among the first to do them. By the time Sonic and Pals came out they were cliches, and he did nothing to evolve them.

The second is the characters - most of them are pretty unlikable. The Author is obviously some bully who uses his godlike powers to attack the characters, whose retaliations are generally justified. But we're also supposed to feel bad for this guy when he loses his powers? Sorry, I didn't. Sonic's intelligence fluctuates wildly, though not in a clever way like Mega Man where it's part of his programming, it's just because Selly or the Author magically increase or decrease his IQ at will.

Knuckles seems like the most grounded of the cast - towards the end of the series he seems to be the most moral as well, alongside Tails, who near the end seems to be the actual main character. Amy's a selfish bitch who doesn't learn from her mistakes and just uses Knuckles for his money, easily the worst character in the entire comic, and Cream is an arrogant inventor with an ego the size of Jupiter.

Horus is on the same level of Knuckles, Pearl and Selly were about on the same level as Tails, just slightly more Mary Sueish, I'm not gonna talk much about the self-insert girlfriends because Kristy left and Casey... didn't really get much time to develop a personality, actually. Robotnik wasn't a threatening villain, and I don't even think he showed up once during the Sonic Rush arc. The robots were AI piloted.

Thirdly, the game stories feel longer than they should and just end up reusing the same jokes over and over and over again. Burning lava, brick walls, throwing things at the Author, at some point entering a coma, characters severely injuring one another, it gets pretty tiresome. The original stories just follow the exact same formulas with little deviation - and Sonic himself is rarely the big hero. The characters are also pretty static - like I said above, Amy never learns to stop spending money, and none of the other characters really change due to a plotline. And at least a couple of them were just dropped with little to no explanation or reason.

Finally, the amount of interrupting filler so that the author can tell us his views on the minutiae of life, such as religion and chain mail, was completely unnecessary. You're writing a gag-a-day comic, give us gag-a-days. Don't interrupt it so you can say how stupid chain mail is. That's what a news section is for. All you're doing is extending the storyline unnecessarily and wasting the day. Coming up with excuses for why the comic is particularly lazy that day, c'mon man, nobody wants to see that shit IN the comic, just explain in the comment you were a little late and don't bring it up anymore after that. Nobody really cares that much if one comic out of a bunch is worse than the others, it's bound to happen.

There's a handful of funny strips in this thing, but I don't think they're worth sitting through the rest.

Characters are like permanent marker on a whiteboard that is the story. You can't erase or edit them, only add on to them.

BUT! Let's say that events are written in dry-erase marker. Dry-erase marker over permanent marker can erase permanent marker, but in order to do so, you have to totally cover it - with a big event that directly affects the character and changes them. Characters can only change due to their experiences.

(Of course, a suitably damaging event that covers the entire character would erase them - their death, so to speak.)

Sonic throughout this whole thing has been more like a character written in dry-erase - his intelligence constantly changing and therefore also his personality, somewhat. But it's not due to any drastic events, it's literally, "I'm bored now, change him." And now it's affected Knuckles, too.

... I think that's a pretty good metaphor. Why didn't I think of that instead of writing a long commercial for Creed! (Which undersells the movie, honestly. It's not a Rocky movie, it's a Creed movie, but Rocky has the more defined personality by the time of the movie [thanks to having had a million of them] which is why I focused on him. Creed needs a sequel though.)

Not really gonna spend too much time on the awkwardness of the True Love Fund thing. I've a feeling he probably actually felt a little guilty for that one.

Now as I said, I can't remember EXACTLY what the actual final goal of the fund was. But judging by the fact that a $100 donation was made, I'm thinking it was in the thousands. Six-thousand sounded about right.

But by all means, if anybody does remember the actual number, please let me know. Because six-thousand also sounds like a bit much, but for some reason that's the number that I can't not think of.

Yeah, I skipped over most of the "Save the Girls" storyline because... it just wasn't interesting.

And if the review's not as funny from here on in because I end up condensing a lot of comics into dry exposition, just remember, it could've been a lot longer. I just mainly looked for comics I could snark on from this point forward, really.

And yeah, Amy Rose is awful.

And... yeah, I didn't really like the Helmeted Author from Bob and George either.

I do take a few potshots at his religion. I'm not gonna go back and edit them and really, if you're gonna be offended by my jokes that easily, maybe you're the one with the problem?

The jokes aren't really that offensive and I actually do think they're funny so I'm not apologizing too much.

My thoughts? Believe what you want, just know there's a difference between believing and knowing. And understand that maybe people could have a point if they don't believe in a ghostwritten book that's thousands of years old and nobody can seem to agree on what it actually says.

If, y'know, he actually spent more time making jokes that weren't, "Man, Shakespeare sure writes things weird, you guys!"

Anyway, I'd like to go into further detail about why such dialogues ill fit this comic - for one, the size of the text compared to the size of the panels is a little on the large side. It's perfect for word balloons no more than two or three lines, but when you start getting into four-line territory, it's out of hand.

Comics are a visual medium - a lot of, if not most, the reading should also come from the visual department. I know at some times lengthy expositions are unavoidable - but when said moments of exposition happen, the structure of the comic should fit it.

Bob and George generally had a relative fix around this - most of the large sections of exposition came as part of a series of flashbacks, so they weren't connected to in-panel dialogue boxes. So it was mainly the composition of the flashback panels that was important, as there was simply a large narration box with all the text in it. It wasn't perfect, mind you, and was fairly clunky (especially since he tended to remain in the four-panel formula), but they were generally spaced far enough apart that it wasn't too bad, and usually came at breaks in the story, like between major events.

It's another one of those weaknesses of sprite comics. They're generally stuck with a static panel structure (anything else would look kind of bizarre), and static composition, so when something comes along that needs something a bit more unorthodox - like lengthy exposition - they tend to falter.

Of course, that's all about exposition. This is a parody of Hamlet, which could have saved a lot of time and a lot of typing just by simplifying the dialogue. So it's even more stupid.

Also, near the top, I make a joke about it being the 500-and-somethingth comic. There's only eight more parts of the review after this, so you're gonna get roughly two-thousand worth of comics over the course of a few dozen.

I just think a silly Sonic sprite comic is not a good vehicle for giving dating advice.

Especially when it's using pre-teens to sell a "don't do it 'till you go through it" message. Like I said, I agree with the general message of waiting until you're sure you're ready, but the messenger is really distracting.

I ain't gonna tell you, 'cause it's a massive spoiler. If you know the spoiler, then you know the game. If you don't know the spoiler, you might still know the game, but then you don't have to worry about it getting spoiled for you.